‘Ancestress’: the beautiful song Björk wrote for her late mother
When Björk released her first solo album, Debut, in 1993, the musician helped to introduce electronic and house beats to mainstream pop. She innovated the genre, blending highly danceable sounds with her idiosyncratic singing voice to create music that felt completely new. Since the early 1990s, musicians have consistently looked back to Debut for inspiration, proving its timelessness, fierce creativity and enduring sound.
Since then, Björk has continued to experiment by pushing the boundaries of pop music, resulting in nine more solo albums and various other collaborations and endeavours. However, her status as one of music’s most influential figures of the past three decades is also a testament to her incredible songwriting abilities, which elevate her ambitious instrumentals to an even higher level of brilliance.
From her sexually explicit lyrical explorations of celebratory love on Vespertine to Vulnicura‘s heartbreaking musings on divorce, Björk has consistently demonstrated her skills as both a musician and a talented writer. On her tenth album, Fossora, released in 2022, Björk dedicated two beautifully written tracks to her late mother, Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir. The environmental activist, who lived in a commune with an infant Björk, passed away in 2018. After suffering a heart attack in 2011, Hauksdóttir spent the last two years of her life in a hospital, using a machine to breathe.
Following her funeral, Björk wrote lyrics that eventually became ‘Ancestress’, the album’s longest song. Over seven minutes, the musician chronicles memories of her mother, beginning in childhood, singing, “When I was a girl, she sang for me/ In falsetto lullabies with sincerity/ I thank her for her integrity.” In the chorus, Björk is joined by her son, Sindri Eldon, as they both sing about Hauksdóttir’s dying moments, “Her once vibrant rebellion is fading.”
In an interview with the Guardian, Björk explained that her mother was 72 when she died. “That’s quite early. I think me and my brother were not ready to … we thought she had ten years left. So we were like: ‘Come on’, and getting her to fight and … and it was like she had an inner clock in her, and she was just ready to go.” Moreover, the musician detailed her mother’s opposition to being in the hospital, “She didn’t agree with all that. She was in the hospital a lot, and it was really difficult on her. It was quite a struggle.”
The elegiac track highlights the beauty of her mother’s idiosyncrasies, referring to her dyslexia as “the ultimate freeform,” praising her ability to form a “language all her own”. Finally, at the end of the song, Björk lets her mother go, singing: “Nature wrote this psalm/ It expands this realm/ Translucent skin let go of/ A cold palm embalmed”. The touching piece utilises mournful strings that make ‘Ancetress’ the perfect celebration of her mother’s life.
Listen to the track below.
